Leopard Tricks and Changes

I've installed Leopard a few times now. (2 home machines and 1 work machine twice). Here are some tips from my experience.

P.S. ps is different

[Edit: As of 10.5.1 or 10.5.2, they changed it back to the BSD style command-line arguments.]
Those of you who do linux system admin probably know the ps command. In Tiger, the ps command used BSD syntax (e.g. ps -aux to get all processes, with -e not working), but in Leopard, it seems that the Linux syntax is now favored (e.g. ps -ef to get all processes). The -u flag of ps no longer works and will give a warning.

Build a New Firewall

When I was restoring my laptop, one of the things that did not translate over (probably because it didn't translate from the upgrade) was my firewall. I had to reconfigure the firewall in Leopard. Fortunately, I only had one custom entry, but still...

Restoring From an Unsupported Drive

You may or may not have seen the nice little command that lets Time Machine backup to SMB shares:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Well, one of the things that was sketchy about the whole thing (aside from backing up over wireless) was how you're going to restore that backup. I did this and I'll tell you how.

Note: I used the User Migration Assistant, not the Leopard DVD to restore the backup. I played at using the DVD, but couldn't get the defaults write command to work (read-only filesystem of the DVD, I guess), so I figured it was pointless. However, I didn't actually try to mount_smb the filesystem, hoping that Time Machine would already be able see it.

Assumptions:
You used the defaults write command to allow Time Machine to backup to unsupported network drives (e.g. SMB share).
You successfully made a recent backup to the SMB share.

Firstly, you need to do a fresh install of Leopard on the target machine. When you get to the point where it asks you for a username, make sure the new username is different from the other usernames on the old system. I'd do something like tmpadmin (Temp Admin).

Secondly, log in and run the defaults write command to get Time Machine cooperative.

Thirdly, mount the SMB share you want to restore from and double-click the .sparsebundle inside the SMB share to mount it. Then start the User Migration Assistant (under Applications -> Utilities). Select the option to use a Time Machine backup. It may take it a while to pop up the SMB share as an option. Afterwards, select what you want to restore. I selected everything I could check.

Lastly, log out and back in as your normal user (assuming it's an Admin account also). Then delete the temporary account, so you don't have an extra admin account floating around.

I was actually really impressed with this. It even restored a custom /etc/hosts.allow that I created!